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1 " The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.'I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.So, I believed. "
― Lance Armstrong , It's Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
2 " I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like. "
― Michael J. Fox , Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist
3 " Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart? "
― Jodi Picoult , Change of Heart
4 " I have my issues with organized religion and cafeteria-style religion, picking and choosing certain dogmas that apply or seem ethical while ignoring the oppressive, non-inclusive, and outdated ones as if they don't exist. The trouble began a long time ago when we tried to bring God indoors. Leave it to mankind to screw it up and to Christians to turn heaven into an exclusive country club. "
5 " To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. "
6 " The soul theoretically is the purview of religion. But in today’s society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair – and for understandable reason. In most ways organized religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, the at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission.Modern psychotherapy has taken up some the slack, and yet it too fails deliver when it doesn the soult necessary to heal our emotional pain. The psychotherapeutic profession has now turned to the pharmaceutical industry to compensate for its frequent lack of effectiveness, yet the pharmaceutical industry lacks the ability to do more about our sadness than to numb it. "
― Marianne Williamson , Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment
7 " The Y Chromosome, organized religion and money are the roots of all evil. "
8 " The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse. "
― N.T. Wright , Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
9 " I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs. "
10 " While I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the eastern philosophies and of course the teachings of Mohammed, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout history. Were I to attend church, I'd be a hypocrite. "
11 " Science does nothing for man spiritually, and organized religion demands blind faith in illogical liturgy that was never meant to be taken literally! "
― Fred Van Lente , Action Philosophers! Giant-Sized Thing, Vol. 1 (Action Philosophers!)
12 " There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion, and I'll show you a hundred retrogressions. "
13 " One of the problems with organized religion is that it has always kept women in a second-class position. They have been viewed as the daughters of Eve. "
14 " Religious beliefs have played a vital role in forming America's character as well as my own. I was raised as a Lutheran, and I believe in God and consider my faith and involvement with organized religion to be an important part of who I am. "
15 " I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.' "
16 " In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country. "
17 " If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe. "
― Kerry Thornley